car culture

Where Have All the Small Stores Gone?

Hank Garfield

A packet of jigsaw blades fits easily into a pocket of my autumn jacket. It so happened that I needed a blade on a recent November afternoon, and I had to think a minute on the easiest way to get one.

There used to be a hardware store in Penobscot Plaza that I could walk to. There used to be one on Broadway that was easy to reach to by bus. But they are gone. With a twinge of sadness, I realized that my best option was Home Depot, out on Stillwater Avenue, one of Bangor’s busiest car corridors. I slung my bicycle onto the Community Connector bus and headed off to the nearest corporate megastore to buy an item smaller than my hand.

We had been doing a home construction project, the lovely Lisa and I, and so far, everything too heavy or too bulky to carry home had been delivered. But sometimes you need to run out and get something. This is when owning a car can seem like a necessity – or at least an awfully handy convenience.

The store is set back from the street by a massive parking lot, sectioned off by raised asphalt islands into smaller lots. There is no designated bus stop, no sidewalk or walkway for pedestrians. Nor are any bike racks in evidence. Bus passengers must navigate the parking lot on foot, and bicyclists at their peril. I locked my bike to an outdoor display of garden tools and went in to find my blades.

As I pedaled home through the car traffic, I pondered the absurdity of operating a two thousand-pound, gas-burning, space-occupying machine to obtain one pocket-sized package of saw blades. Doesn’t anybody consider this, well, wasteful?

It’s bad enough for someone like me, who has chosen not to own a car and to live with the inconveniences. It’s worse for people who have no choice: those who can’t drive, due to medical, financial, or other reasons.

In 1999, I packed my kids, the dog, the cat, and all our worldly belongings into an Aerostar van and a U-Haul trailer and moved from California to Maine. We tried to take local roads instead of the Interstate when we could. As we went through Illinois and Indiana, we began to sense the same story in every town. The brick post office and a church or two in the old town center, and then, a mile or more away, at the junction with the highway, a cluster of the same 15 or 20 corporate businesses. The same chains in every town. I hoped it would never happen to Maine.

But it has. It just took a quarter of a century longer to happen here. You can no longer walk down to Joe’s Hardware Store and buy a rake, or a set of jigsaw blades, or anything else you might need. You have been handed another reason to own and drive a car, and another alternative has been eliminated.

It’s not just hardware stores. Downtown of small cities like Bangor seem to be replete with restaurants and bars and places to buy art or antiques, but mostly devoid of outlets for the practical items of day-to-day life. I’ve had similar problems getting ink cartridges, fresh fruit, cleaning supplies, clothing, and scotch tape. The whole idea of walkable cities and downtowns is predicated on the idea that people can live, work and shop in a small area. If you must go to an outlying box store to get what you need, doesn’t that defeat the purpose? Shouldn’t city planners be considering this when they draw up zoning regulations?

Car ownership would not seem like such a necessity in an environment where Joe’s Hardware could coexist with Home Depot. But powerful forces seem to want as many of us to drive and own cars as possible. Never mind the millions of Americans excluded from such a system, or the damage our dependence on cars inflicts on the natural world. The car is encouraged and incentivized at every turn.

But we can do something about it, however small and incremental. We can patronize pedestrian-friendly businesses. We can eschew drive-throughs. As much as possible, we can avoid the big-box stores. There isn’t always a choice. That’s why we need to use the choices we still have.

Green Means More Than Grasping at Straws

Hank Garfield

A silly meme on Facebook – a paper straw in a plastic wrapper titled “The Green movement in a nutshell” – got me thinking about my own environmentalist leanings, and my commitment to not owning a car.

Growing up on the Maine Coast gave me an environmental consciousness I never thought of as political. I instinctively pick up trash and recoil at litter, much of which includes non-recyclable plastic. But while a ton of straws can break a camel’s back, we aren’t going to save the planet by focusing on minutiae like straws. 

What do straws have to do with cars? They both kill turtles, for one thing. But cars do a whole lot more damage than that. Aside from the thousands of people killed yearly in crashes, motor vehicles contribute to a long laundry list of insults to the global ecosystem. They burn finite fossil fuels and spew greenhouse gases. They necessitate the construction of acres of parking lots, which radiate heat back into the atmosphere, eliminate wetlands, and pollute reservoirs with run-off. They encourage the development of car-centric suburbs with huge per-capita carbon footprints. They foster graveyards of spent tires and dead vehicles that continue to pollute years after they stop moving.

Although I consider myself an environmentalist, I stopped owning cars for none of those reasons. I stopped owning cars because they cost too much money. I resented the idea that I needed a car at my service 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. There are plenty of cars around. Surely I could find one to use when I needed to, without the economic onus of owning one.

The past 17 years have vindicated this conviction. I now have a savings account instead of a monthly car payment and an ongoing insurance policy. I don’t waste precious minutes of my life sitting in traffic jams. On foot, on a bicycle, or on a bus, I’m healthier and happier than I would be seething and swearing at people from behind a windshield.

It hasn’t come without cost, or without compromises. I have had to adjust my lifestyle and change some habits. I leave ample time to get to the places I need to go, and I sometimes don’t get to other places I want to go. For most of those years, I’ve lived with someone who owned a car. Four months ago, we became a no-car household.

So far, we’ve managed. We did not visit family for Thanksgiving, and we have not yet needed to take the dog to the vet. Have you ever noticed that almost all veterinarians are way out on the edge of town? In October we rented a car and the three of us went to the coast for a weekend, but we can’t jump up and do that on the spur of the moment.

It isn’t only veterinarians. Hardware stores are hard to find anywhere outside of Lowe’s and Home Depot, always built where it’s hard to get to other than by car. The buses stop running before many people get out of work. To live without a car in a small city like Bangor, far from any major metropolitan center, is to endure a multitude of inconveniences.

Are the inconveniences worth the rewards? In my case, the answer was, and is still, “Yes.” But I don’t need a car to get to and from my primary job, and I do much of it on-line. It’s a 15-minute walk to downtown and an even shorter walk to a corner convenience store. Renting a car works out to about a hundred dollars a day, which seems like a lot until you consider that the average annual cost of owning a car is $10,000, equal to 100 car rentals.

I’m lucky, in that I can choose not to own a car. Many don’t have that choice. They either can’t afford one, or can’t drive one, for physical or other reasons. Life is even more inconvenient for them.

Cars are a convenience, and an environmental disaster. Hence the conundrum: how does an environmentally responsible citizen retain the convenience while reducing the harm? Many people are choosing to go electric.

Electric cars are marginally better for the environment, as this article from the New York Times details. But they require lithium and cobalt mining, which aren’t any kinder to the planet than oil rigs and refineries. They will not stop suburban sprawl or the hollowing out of small business districts in favor of outlying big-box stores with massive parking lots.

If we are to be serious about our stewardship of the planet, as I believe we must be, then we can do better than to substitute one environmental disaster for a slightly lesser one. Electric cars won’t do a whole lot of good if we use them the way we use gas-powered cars now.

Instead, we can invest in comprehensive public transportation, promote pedestrian-friendly neighborhoods with a mixture of business and residential use, and incentivize development on a human rather than an automotive scale.

Why do you get a straw when you order a glass of water at a bar, anyway? You can drink it just fine without one. Owning a car should not be a necessity. Entrenched interests make it feel like one. We must work toward a world in which alternative choices are equally appealing.

Old, Entrenched Attitudes Die Hard in Car-Centric California

Hank Garfield

This is what we’re up against. 

Fox News recently gave the top of its Web page to an opinion piece by San Diego County Supervisor Jim Desmond, under this screen-spanning headline: “San Diego wants to tax people out of their cars and into public transportation.”

My first reaction: It’s about time.

Desmond lives in Oceanside, California. I used to live there. He came to North San Diego County in 1984, a year after I did. Companies were investing in new business parks near freeway ramps and surrounded by parking lots. The area had a decent bus network, and a commuter train along the coast. But little effort was made to integrate the outlying business parks with public transit, giving all those employees little choice but to drive, and exacerbating already bad traffic congestion.

After sixteen years, I gave up on California and moved back to Maine, a place with much less traffic but also fewer options. In both places, the so-called choice of driving is, for many people, hardly a choice at all.

The language Desmond uses is telling. He charges that San Diego’s most recent regional transportation plan is “designed to make driving so expensive that you succumb to public transportation.” I’m sorry, but “succumb”? It’s usually the other way around. People who want to use public transit are forced to reluctantly buy a car. For most of my adult life, I “succumbed” to the idea that car ownership was a necessity of modern American life. Every government transportation incentive over the past fifty years has encouraged driving and discouraged the development of alternatives.

Desmond trots out several dated and debunked arguments to prop up his position:

Desmond: “Government agendas should not be used to change behavior by taxing us into fixed-rail trains and buses. Instead of changing behavior, government entities should incentivize technology and innovation.” 

Slower Traffic: When Maine passed its returnable bottle law in 1976, people stopped throwing bottles from car windows. The bottles and cans that lined many roadways disappeared within months. Littering was already illegal, but sometimes people need a nudge from government to do the right thing. 

History abounds with examples of this, from civil rights to workplace safety to smoking in bars and restaurants. Governments pass laws, which in turn influence behavior. It’s ridiculous to argue that government should not and cannot be an agent for positive change.

Desmond: “Government should embrace what most people are already choosing, and make it cleaner, safer, and more efficient.  The people have spoken, they choose freedom of movement and not broken promises or additional taxes.”

Slower Traffic: This is a classic circular argument. People choose cars because government transportation policy encourages this choice and punishes others. Car owners are, as the late Jane Holtz Kay documented in her 1997 book Asphalt Nation, “responding to a rigged market… price supports for ring roads, beltways, and free parking… taxes and infrastructure that promote far-flung highways and suburban homes.” If the nearest grocery store is more than a mile away, and your job is in a business park surrounded by parking lots but nowhere near a bus stop, are you really making a free choice, or bowing to a de facto requirement? The people have not “spoken.” They’ve obeyed.

Desmond: Who will this affect the most? The lowest income earners. The math is simple, those that earn less will pay a disproportionately higher percentage of their income to get to where they need to go.

Slower Traffic: Lower earners already pay a larger percentage of their income on transportation. This has been true for decades. It’s still cheaper to take the bus than to own a car. Shifting money from the car system to public transit via taxation can help level the playing field. But this is exactly what Desmond opposes. 

Our motor vehicles and their ancillary services are a cumulative environmental disaster. Cars aren’t going away anytime soon, but doesn’t it make sense to soften their impact, on both the climate and our overall quality of life? I don’t know anyone who enjoys the stop-and-go freeway traffic I lived with every day in California. San Diego has, to its credit, expanded its trolley system, and built a downtown baseball stadium that replaced the one in the conglomeration of freeways and parking lots of Mission Valley. (Full disclosure: I voted for the ballpark, which passed 60-40% in 1998.) 

Public transportation is the future. But people like Desmond seem determined to stand in the way.